Chernyshevskii, Nikolai Gavrilovich (1828–1889)

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CHERNYSHEVSKII, NIKOLAI GAVRILOVICH
(1828–1889)

Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevskii, the Russian literary and social critic, was the guiding spirit of Russian nihilism and a major representative of positivistic materialism in nineteenth-century Russian philosophy.

Chernyshevskii was born in Saratov, Russia. The son of an Orthodox priest, he attended a theological seminary before entering the University of St. Petersburg in 1846. After his graduation in 1850, he taught secondary school in Saratov until 1853, when he returned to St. Petersburg, secured a master's degree in Russian literature, and began writing for leading reviews. He soon became a principal editor of Sovremennik (The contemporary), and by the early 1860s was the foremost spokesman of radical socialist thought in Russia. Arrested in 1862, he was banished to Siberia in 1864 and passed the remaining twenty-five years of his life in forced exile. He was permitted to return to Saratov, in failing health, a few months before his death.

In his student days Chernyshevskii was attracted to the writings of the French socialists and of G. W. F. Hegel and the left-wing Hegelians. In 1849 he read Ludwig Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity and by 1850 had formed an allegiance to Feuerbach that was decisive in his philosophical development. He was also influenced by the English utilitarians, notably John Stuart Mill, whose Principles of Political Economy he translated into Russian in 1860.

Chernyshevskii's master's dissertation and first philosophical work, Esteticheskie otnosheniia iskusstva k deistvitel'nosti (The aesthetic relation of art to reality; St. Petersburg, 1855), is a critique of Hegelian aesthetics "deduced" (as Chernyshevskii later expressed it) from Feuerbach's naturalistic principles. Chernyshevskii argued that art is an aesthetically inferior substitute for concrete reality. The essential purpose of art is to reproduce the phenomena of real life that are of interest to man, compensating for his lack of opportunity to experience the reality itself. The derivative purposes of art, which give it a moral dimension, are to explain this reality for the benefit of man and to pass judgment upon it. Chernyshevskii developed his aesthetic views further, emphasizing the social context of art, in his Ohcerki gogolevskogo perioda russkoi literatury (St. Petersburg, 1855–1856; translated as Essays on the Gogol Period of Russian Literature ).

In his chief philosophical work, a long essay titled Antropologicheskii printsip v filosofii (The anthropological principle in philosophy; 1860), Chernyshevskii exhibited his acceptance of Feuerbach's anthropologism and adopted the materialistic position he retained throughout his life. By "the anthropological principle" Chernyshevskii meant the conception of man as a unitary organism whose nature is not bifurcated into "spiritual" and "material" elements. He argued that philosophical questions can be resolved only from this point of view and by the methods of the natural sciences. Indeed, in all their essentials such questions had already been resolved by the sciences, according to Chernyshevskii: Man is a complex chemical compound whose behavior is strictly subject to the law of causality, who in every action seeks his own pleasure, and whose character is determined by the features of the environment within which he is obliged to act.

On this basis Chernyshevskii advocated "rational egoism"—an ethical theory of enlightened egoistic utilitarianism—and maintained that radical reconstruction of the social environment is needed to create happy and productive individuals. He portrayed these "new people" and the socialist order of the future in a novel, Chto delat'? (What Is to Be Done?, St. Petersburg, 1863), which was the principal literary tract of Russian nihilism and was for decades enormously influential in the radical movement. In his socioeconomic thought in general Chernyshevskii emphasized the peasant commune and the artel and is considered an important forerunner of Russian Populism.

Chernyshevskii was a severe critic of neo-Kantian phenomenalism. In a number of letters and in the essay Kharakter Chelovecheskovo Znaniya (The character of human knowledge; Moscow, 1885), written in exile, he espoused epistemological realism and condemned the skepticism and "illusionism" (as he called it) of such scientists as Rudolf Virchow and Emil Heinrich Du Bois-Reymond.